A few places are considering some radical change. Iceland may start issuing government currency only - https://www.scribd.com/doc/260617614/Iceland-Monetary-Reform

It's maybe easy to see we are being had and taught more or less the opposite of what is going on and what we are from a teaching perspective - inside the magic circle so to speak. The very people who know magic is not being done are the magicians.

On Thursday, April 2, 2015 at 2:46:32 PM UTC+1, archytas wrote:

So what more positive might there be Molly? One can welcome the "system that honors the life of a person and offers real team work instead of the current cardboard cut out of it" But how do we recognise the reality, how little work is really needed and how we might have secure lives very different from what's on offer now as slaves to American state capital? I'd hope everyone can see that the term "American" doesn't work very well - we are actually slaves to a capital more difficult to pin down.

Yet even in play, we seem to find it impossible to see ourselves other than in the easy dreams. Don makes sense - still lamentably unusual - but what of a n"ew dream not prevented from practice by false assumptions? "Americans" don't like thinking of themselves as bureaucrats (Napoleon has the British as 'a nation of shopkeepers' before we screwed him good) - "we" like more heroic notions, even of Don's 'getting by as a cog in the wheel'. People need to see bureaucracy as something other than what happens in government offices and to do with the secret pleasures of their own lives. The cemented dominance of fundamentally conservative managerial elites - corporate bureaucrats who use the pretext of short-term, competitive, bottom line thinking to squelch anything likely to have revolutionary implications of any kind.

I guess most of us can't stand to recognise we've been stiffed. Hence I'm talking about 'you American commies' or 'SAPs'.

On Thursday, April 2, 2015 at 1:21:12 PM UTC+1, Molly wrote:

Like the paradigms of our financial, relational and communication systems that are changing with no clear new paradigm to move into, it is not hard to imagine that "work" in our life can change with these, especially the financial paradigms. Were many now are unemployed or underemployed, and those employed treated like commodities and worked way beyond the limits of the law, a system that honors the life of a person and offers real team work instead of the current cardboard cut out of it would be welcome. I see more work arounds than honest work, simply because they are necessary.

On Thursday, April 2, 2015 at 12:35:04 AM UTC-4, archytas wrote:

Today's bureaucratic organisational forms almost certainly arise in Germany and the United States We live in a time when we need something more poetic, positive and fantastic. To understand this we need to see almost everything is not as it seems and as we are told. By poetic technologies, I mean the use of rational, technical, bureaucratic means to bring wild, impossible fantasies to life. Universities produce reams of paper telling us all we foster imagination and creativity in an environment in which the barest glimpse of this in the eyes is strangled at birth. To my shame I have been known to toss research proposals of grad students in the bin, declaring them potentially original. The kids look bemused when I tell them that to do original research they have to do something already understood, otherwise no one will understand their creativity. A timid, bureaucratic spirit has come to suffuse every aspect of academic life. This is cloaked in a language of creativity, initiative and entrepreneurialism, probably from a CEO who is a sex pest and rips off the college for a Bentley, a house loan and job for his unqualified girlfriend. My view is this is modern Americanism and most of the world has been suckered by it.

The odd student picks her submission out of the bin and asks how she might get the work done while pretending to do something else.

On Thursday, April 2, 2015 at 3:36:57 AM UTC+1, archytas wrote:

Work looks like it is 90% bullshit these days. Reward is closer to 99% bull. We could obviously look sensibly into such matters, establishing what needs doing and apportioning it fairly. Something is in the way, including our own fears on personal idleness and being made to work harder once management finds out we spend most of our work time avoiding work. Thinking this through is tough, so you can bet 90% of people won't try.

On Thursday, 2 April 2015 03:16:06 UTC+1, archytas wrote:

Don't make me into a holy liberal Don! Though I am no longer a believer we remotely do things as you say - such may have been true when we were being dragged up I never liked losing much. You'd have to think on whether I want to screw the work ethic or find one that works. You can't seriously tell me you believe there is much link between bending your back and reward these days, except in hay rolling.

On Thursday, April 2, 2015 at 2:12:40 AM UTC+1, Don Johnson wrote:

Soviet yes, paradise no. Why on God's green earth would you want to destroy the work ethic? The problem with kids today is they don't have one. Not only that, they aren't even ashamed about it! Work still has to be done Neil who's going to do it? Sure the hell not me I'd rather teach others the work ethic I never quite absorbed. Leading by example is too exhausting. That's for younsters. And immigrants. How do we find out who the best and brightest are? Testing? That's infamously unreliable. We find out by giving kids tasks and seeing how well they complete them and how well they deal with failure and what they do to recover. Separates the winners from the losers. There is no existance without losers Neil. They are as necesary as food and water. Fail some today, learn, and succeed tomorrow. Boom and bust. (see what i did there?)

dj

On Wednesday, April 1, 2015 at 2:18:56 AM UTC-5, archytas wrote:

Primitive societies are much more egalitarian and murderous than ours. I've never done first contact. Playing rugby league in PNG was enough for me. First contact would be a good place for people who protest at the use of words like primitive to understand it is a mistake to leave the AK-M behind. The idea that there ever was a paradise to regain is likely tosh, though you can imagine we might have had to regress to enter this universe and evolve to current awareness through various stages - and still carry the baggage of the dinosaurs and so on.

People have strange notions about government. I can make a case that the USA is now the paradigm case of the Soviet Paradise. It's pretty obvious that none of us get to vote for government, but rather something more akin to union representatives who negotiate with the bankers and crooks who run the show, though the union concerned is a house or sweet-heart one. Surely, not even Sartre could come up with a play so dull it was about people seeking freedom through voting Clinton, Bush, Cameron, Milliband or Hollande - Sarkoszy! You nearly had that utter weirdo who ran a bit of Alaska until it turned out she was banged by a black guy when at college.

Would anyone want to deny the US is now a Soviet Paradise? I still meet a few Europeans who believe they live in a democracy or might if they vote fascist. The job looks so screwed to me that I think we should start again. You'd think this would be pretty straight-forward if we lived in an open and democratic society.